Tom Whipple at the FCNP has an article on the cold fusion / free energy world, displaying rather less skepticism than I feel comfortable with (but I guess it's a change from the intense doomerism he traditionally emanated back in the heyday of peak oil) - The Peak Oil Crisis: Hydrinos In Your Future?.

In recent months I have written about the progress being made in “cold fusion” which is short hand for a third way to extract energy from the forces binding atoms together. Some who are familiar with the details of what has been going on appreciate that we are nearly over denying that cold fusion is real as at least three companies have mastered the technology at lab bench level and are working on commercial-scale hydrogen powered devices that hopefully will one day replace fossil fuels as a source of energy for heat, electricity, and transportation.

The Italian developer Rossi seems to have linked up with a North Carolina company that not only is supplying the cash he needs to develop a marketable product, but apparently has made contacts to develop the technology in China.

The California company Brillouin was recently the subject of a series of videos detailing the current state of development of the prototype commercial boiler it is developing along with SRI to replace fossil fuels as the source of heat in electric power stations. Moreover Brillouin has recently licensed its technology to a Korean manufacturer who hopes to have a prototype in operation before the end of the year. The major take home from the videos, however, is that scaling up cold fusion from lab bench to commercial boiler size will involve some difficult engineering.

The third major contender in the race for cold fusion, Defkalion Green Technologies, announced last week that they are making good progress and hope to “commercialize’ their technology by the third quarter of this year. All three of these companies say they have had their technology verified by outside scientists, but have no intention of releasing their proprietary techniques as to how they make cold fusion work at this time.

Last week another contender in the race to replace fossil fuels resurfaced with the announcement by a New Jersey company, BlackLight Power, that it has applied for a patent and will be demonstrating its technology to selected observers on February 28th. BlackLight Power and its technology has been around for over 20 years; has raised and spent circa $80 million developing their technology; and have released a mountain of reports, data and even books describing how their technology works. Every few years they have announced that they were close to a commercial product that could produce heat, but somehow they always slipped back into the R&D mode and were largely forgotten even by close observers of the field and certainly not remembered by the mainstream media.

The biggest problem with gaining acceptance for the technology that BlackLight Power claims to have invented that it is so revolutionary that, should it pan out, the world and much science will never be the same. The simple version of BlackLight’s technology is easy to understand. By taking hydrogen atoms (protons with an electron orbiting around the nucleus), all one has to do is give the atoms a good zap of electricity in the presence of the right catalyst and the electrons drop down into orbits closer to the nuclei – releasing very large amounts of energy in the process.

After the hydrogen atoms’ electrons falls into a lower orbit, the resulting now-shrunken atom was called a “hydrino” by its discoverer, Randell Mills. The main problem with this idea is that our current chemistry says there are no stable states of hydrogen below what is known as the base state. Therefore most scientists say Mill’s hydrino thesis must be wrong. For 20 years, Mills has had to contend with an endless string of naysayers, including some very well-known scientists many of which called him a charlatan for raising and spending some $80 million dollars in search of something which cannot possibly be true – or so they contend.

Blacklight is not the most credible LENR company. They theory is really not compatible with existing science , and they failed to deliver since 20 years...Anyway they have validation of some effects, but my feeling is that they have lab toys like what everybody have already...Far from the kW proven by E-cat/Levi/Elforsk test.

To see who is working on that domain (dozens on companies, small and big, a hand ful of reactors ...) you can read tha executive summaryhttp://www.lenrnews.eu/lenr-summary-for-policy-makers/or http://www.lenrftw.net/home/are-low-energy-nuclear-reaction-devices-real

to have the scientific situation (in 2000) and understand the tragedy of cold fusion, the best book is the very well documented book of Charles Beaudette : Excess Heathttp://iccf9.global.tsinghua.edu.cn/lenr%20home%20page/acrobat/BeaudetteCexcessheat.pdf

My rusty chemistry reminds me that orbitals exist (some of the time at least) as standing waves (to accommodate the wave particle duality theory). According to the standing wave in a one dimensional box model, an electron in an orbital less than the ground state of the current model would be unstable. What Blacklight are proposing is that one end of the box essentially doesn't exist. In theory an electron in such an arrangement should self cancel. Blacklight seems to keep part of the quantum theory intact, ie the absorption and release of quanta of energy during transitions from one orbital to another. But what is not answered by this blacklight theory is why such sub orbitals should be the perfect fractions that they posit - ie if the box doesn't have another wall then why can't these orbitals be any fractional value of the ground state? AND given that the electrons must presumably still return to the ground state, given that that is where science observes most of the orbitals to be, for the hypothetical electron orbitals Blacklight proposes, this would mean that when an electron returns from these hypothetical suborbitals to the ground state they MUST absorb energy. So you could in theory only get energy for such a device so long as you managed to keep electrons in these hypothesised lower orbitals, the moment electrons return to the ground state any gains are wiped out!

So I suggest the theory is internally inconsistent. It tries to keep intact a part of the current theory to explain itself - but what is the fudge factor that makes it work? Do they propose that the proton in the hydrogen atoms absorb the electron and it becomes a neutron!Any physicists out there?